Fastest Drives Ever – The New World of NVMe

As unreal as 5800MB/s reads and 3500MB/s writes might sound to you, the really incredible part is that’s not even testing what these drives are best at doing; smaller IO.

NVMe is a Paradigm Shift

This benchmark is from an striped set of 2 (!) Samsung PM961 NVMe drives. If you’re curious how fast a single drive is, it’s slightly more than half of what you see above. The crazy thing is, these aren’t even the fastest drives – they’re the budget, slightly slower version. The faster ones are the SM961, and while these models may not sound familiar, they’re just the OEM versions of the more commonly-known Samsung 960 series. Needless to say, they’re all incredibly fast. So fast, they broke the Blackmagic Disk test.

Why It’s Not all Sunshine and Rainbows

Now for the bad news for Apple owners – if you want to use the fastest drives and get this kind of performance, you’re pretty much out of luck. There is no Apple product that can use these to their capabilities. We ran a similar Toshiba OCZ RD400 in a 2008 Mac Pro (mode 3,1) and were rewarded with this:

Meanwhile, in an up-to-date system, that same drive benchmarked much better:

The reason? Pre-2009 Mac Pros don’t have the PCIe bandwidth to support faster rates, and limit the NVMe link speed. 2009 and later are also bandwidth limited, but will run at up to 1500MB/s, though that’s the limit they can support.

What about newer Mac Pros, the 2014+ “trashcan” style? They can’t use these either – the connector is different (Apple doesn’t use the M2 standard connector). All of which pushed us to come up with a solution.

A Not-So-tinyIron Solution

This is our new Mac Pro: an X99-based screamer with 64GB of RAM (expandable to 128GB), the 2x Samsung PM961, and six conventional hard drives, to start. We could put up to 7 of the fastest drives in this machine, getting us close to 20GB/s read speeds if we needed to. That’s beyond ludicrous speed – it’s a whole new world of computing.